One Battle After Another Review

There may be no moment in film this year, if not this decade or even this century, more relatable than Leonardo DiCaprio’s reaction to learning the answer to his underground army’s impossible-to-remember code phrase, “What is the time?”

From the absurdity of the setup to the pretentiousness of the explanation, and even to fugitive Bob Ferguson’s (DiCaprio) profane punchline, it contains the entirety of Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling post-revolutionary epic within it.

Deeply felt but discursive and frequently in search of a point, One Battle After Another rarely reaches such a pointed payoff where all of its ideas and influences gather into one powerful punch to the temple. But when it does, it eclipses all else around it.

That does first require accepting a lot that is truly silly up front when Bob connects with fellow revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) to defeat the anti-immigration police forces led by Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Looking for verisimilitude is self-defeating in Anderson’s fever dream world, regardless of how ‘of the now’ it presents itself. Its logic exists somewhere between satire and hallucination.

After Perfidia is captured and turns state’s evidence against Bob and his revolutionary cell, Bob is forced to flee to suburbia with his and Perfidia’s young daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), hoping to disappear into obscurity.

Sixteen years later, however, Lockjaw’s attempt to join the powerful Christmas Adventurer’s Society is blocked by a suspected dalliance with Perfidia, leading him to chase down anyone vaguely connected to her who might spill the beans, including Bob and his now teenage daughter. With the revolution on their doorstep, their only choices are to fight or flee. Just take it at face value, and it all makes sense. Kind of.

The point is not the nightmarish police state Anderson paints in his portrait of the future (which bears a striking resemblance to today), or the confused and unfocused revolt against it. Like Ari Aster’s Eddington, One Battle After Another prefers to mock both as different versions of the same failure, so focused on their own protocols and jargon, they have lost all connection with humanity and the misery they are causing to everyone around them.

Every so often, it stops to show the real cost of this absurdity on real people as they flee from police or wait in makeshift prisons, turning whatever strange place they end up into a home. In between these moments, it’s a land of drug-addled fifty-year-olds trying to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world.

It’s a sharp reminder of how good Anderson is with comedy when he leaves himself to it, as well as how easily he can swerve between tones. One Battle After Another veers sharply from absurdity to desperation to fury as Bob attempts to rise out of the drug and alcohol induced stupor he has spent the previous decades in when he must find and rescue Willa.

Less of a lynchpin, he is a device to fling the story into the doorstep of the various characters the pair discover in their travels, and to whom the heavy thematic lifting is left. Bob and Penn’s Lockjaw are one-joke wonders who have the benefit of being funnier than anything else around them. The biggest travesty is the lack of scenes between the two.

Instead, it’s Infiniti’s effervescent Willa who knits the worlds of One Battle After Another together, particularly after the secrets of her background start to come to light. What grounding in emotional ache the movie has is always at her hands; Bob is just too lost in the weeds trying to keep up with kung fu masters and secret codes.

When the film pauses long enough to see the world through her eyes, the noise recedes, and something startlingly human emerges.

In the end, One Battle After Another is less a story than a collision of impulses—comic, tragic, satirical, sentimental—that never quite reconcile but occasionally spark into brilliance. Anderson is fully aware of the contradictions he’s juggling and resolutely refuses to smooth them out.

That’s part of its unruly charm. Like the people at its center, its weaknesses are what define it, for better or for worse, mostly for better.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER REVIEW RATING: 8 OUT OF 10

Warner Bros. Pictures will release One Battle After Another in theaters on Friday, September 26, 2025. The film is rated R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, and drug use.